Traditionally, viewing window paradigms have been used to evaluate perceptual features useful in object identification. Participants are presented with a degraded picture of an object on a computer monitor and are asked to identify the object as quickly as possible. A small, user controlled area (the "window") displays the underlying image with normal clarity. Despite their traditional role, vi...

Attitude certainty has been the subject of considerable attention in the attitudes and persuasion literature. The present research identifies 2 aspects of attitude certainty and provides evidence for the distinctness of the constructs. Specifically, it is proposed that attitude certainty can be conceptualized, and empirically separated, in terms of attitude clarity (the subjective sense that on...

The resurgence of social epidemiology has yet to induce corresponding research into basic measurement issues. This paper aims to motivate investigators to refocus attention on the measurement of socioeconomic status (SES). With a primarily American focus, we document striking paucity of basic research in SES, review the history of SES measurement, highlight the central limitations of current me...

It is common to only use Reverberation Time (RT) for setting the acoustic conditions in a classroom for teaching and learning activities. To calculate the RT in rooms with ceiling absorption is common but this data can also be misleading. Indeed, we measured the same RT values in two identical rooms with different acoustic treatment, even though the calculations predicted significant difference...

The practice of medicine involves inherent ambiguity, arising from limitations of knowledge, diagnostic problems, complexities of treatment and outcome and unpredictability of patient response. Research into doctors' tolerance of ambiguity is hampered by poor conceptual clarity and inadequate measurement scales. We aimed to create and pilot a measurement scale for tolerance of ambiguity in medi...

An increasing number of realist evaluations are being conducted from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and with diverse, fit-for-purpose methods. This commentary discusses the recent BMC Medicine publication of RAMESES II reporting guidelines for realist evaluations. Knowledge users such as program implementers and decision-makers will benefit from the increased transparency of reportin...

This study sought to identify what characteristics faculty who are effective classroom communicators share. Qualitative methods of interviews and observations were used to collect data at two public, comprehensive universities. College faculty with good communication, particularly, immediacy and clarity, were all found to have humanistic views of their students and to be reflective about their ...

Recruitment of pregnant women in labour to clinical trials poses particular challenges. Interpretation of regulation lacks consistency or clarity and variation occurs as to the training required by clinicians to safely contribute to the conduct of intrapartum studies. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Intrapartum Clinical Study Group initiated the development of a pragmatic,...

BACKGROUND The accurate recording of findings in clinical medicolegal cases is important, yet the current J88 form used for this purpose in South Africa has been reported to have many flaws. In addition, there are reports of poor completion of the form, which could in part be due to its poor design and clarity. OBJECTIVE To describe the process that was undertaken to revise the current J88 fo...

Due to the nature of involved optics, the depth of field in imaging systems is usually constricted in the field of view. As a result, we get the image with only parts of the scene in focus. To extend the depth of field, fusing the images at different focus levels is a promising approach. This paper proposes a novel multifocus image fusion approach based on clarity enhanced image segmentation an...